Donald Creighton and His Macdonald
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Introduction Donald Creighton and His Macdonald PB. WAITE Half a century ago the History Department at the University of Toronto inhabited a spacious old house at the corner of St. George and College streets that once belonged to Robert Baldwin, the Reform politician from the I 84os and I 8 50s. Hence it was called Baldwin House. In I950-5I, in a large west room on the ground floor, for two hours Donald Creighton held his weekly graduate seminar in Canadian history, I 840 to I 900. There were a dozen graduate students there that year, some of them war veterans, from several universities-Dalhousie, U.N.B., Queen's, Manitoba, U.B.C., as well as Toronto. The topic for discussion one January afternoon in I 9 5 I was the Pacific Scandal, with a paper given by an M.A. student from western Canada. The paper was not all that good, a slapdash affair grubbed up from secondary sources, mostly from Sir Joseph Pope's biography of Macdonald published in I 894. There was little use of primary sources, nothing from the Royal Commission Report on the scandal, nothing from the news papers. Creighton, long, lean and pensive, presided at the head of the table. In our experience he had always been fair. That he had opin ions we knew, but he rarely obtruded them. He seemed to be after what had really happened; he neither wanted nor expected con formity with his own views. So he did not ride roughshod over student papers, bullying as Chester Martin, head of the depart ment from I928 to I952, was wont to do. Creighton respected evidence and taught us to do so also. You could tell him anything if you could prove it from the documents. He wanted you to reach xxx INTRODUCTION for the truth, whatever that might be. But he did expect you to make the effort of reaching. Now, however, after fifteen minutes it was all too patent that this Pacific Scandal paper was thin and the effort put into it negligible. Creighton raised his hand. "I think," he said coolly and politely, "that we shall have to tidy this up a lit tle." Creighton had never done this before; we sat silent, a little abashed that one of our number had, so to speak, let the side down. We soon forgot our discomfort, however, and Creighton made no further mention of the matter. We soon forgot even the winter afternoon closing in outside. Creighton began to weave-there is no better word for it-the story of the Pacific Scandal, the railway negotiations, the struggle between Montreal and Toronto over C.P.R. control, the blackmail once the Americans got themselves in, how the Liberals bribed the clerk in J.J.C. Abbott's Montreal office, how he stole in and got at the files, pulled out the incrimi nating letters and telegrams and sidled out into the Montreal night, how they were published in the newspapers in July, I 8 73, and how Macdonald handled the whole messy affair-not all that well. We were on the edge of our seats; Creighton was like a sor cerer around a campfire telling the story of a great adventure. He was enjoying himself. Finally, at 6:ro p.m., Macdonald having resigned with his government in ruins, Creighton stopped. "That, gentlemen," said he, "is the Pacific Scandal." We burst into applause. Most of us had never heard anything like it before; some of us have heard nothing like it since. It was a bravura performance. We knew it and he knew it. He was moved by our demonstration, though he tried not to let that show. We stood around talking admiringly after he left, then slowly dispersed to our several lodgings across the big Toronto campus through the 1 gathering winter night. Donald Creighton came from a literary family, the son of Laura Harvie and William Black Creighton, editor of the Methodist Christian Guardian. Born in Toronto on July I 5, I 902, he was brought up in a modest home on Hewitt Avenue, just east of High Park, and went to Humberside Collegiate. He then took Honour English and History at Victoria College, where he graduated in I 92 5. He went on to Balliol College, Oxford, in the autumn of DONALD CREIGHTON AND HIS MACDONALD xxxi I 92 5 on a scholarship, feeling very much the colonial in accent, style, clothing, manners and money. He was a product of the Methodist Toronto of the 1920s-a narrow and earnest society, though in its decidedly bourgeois way it tried to be civilized. In some ways it was. Its high-school education was still solid; at Humberside Collegiate Creighton had learned by heart a good deal of English poetry: Browning's "Home-Thoughts, from the Sea"-"Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent to the North-West died away"-and more radically for that time, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." In some ways that poem sums up Creighton's early alternations oflove and despair: ... for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night. He had an extraordinary knowledge of, and memory for, poetry. He was well-read in English literature and in French; he believed scholars should be. He was difficult to beat in that game played over drinks and friendship when one added, if one could, to the first line of a poem the next, or even the rest of the stanza. At Oxford, Creighton read little in the constitutional history of the British Empire, often the heartland for Canadian students as the only historical ground that touched on Canada. Instead he read mainly European and British history, and slowly gathered around him, like a cloak, the great traditions ofEuropean civiliza tion. But a Canadian he was born and it showed. Indeed, he soon came to resent not having been born and brought up English; that Humberside schooling was not Marlborough or Winchester. He would resent even more the airs and contempt reserved by the English for colonials, however talented, who might occasionally affront well-established manners and traditions. One of those traditions was certainly that Oxford undergradu ates did not marry. In London on June 23, 1926, after his first xxxii INTRODUCTION year, Creighton married Luella Bruce, a sprightly Canadian girl from StouffVille, Ontario. They eventually came to a decision to live for a time separately, Luella in Paris and her young husband at Balliol. Creighton wanted to do graduate work at the University of Paris when he finished his Oxford B.A. in 1927. His spoken French was not as good as his wife's; like many English Canadians he had grown up without hearing French, coming to it via French grammar. Though he was well-versed in the language and spoke it accurately, his French was heavy with English accents, his French "u" and his French "r" both sounding like west Toronto, which they were. What determined Creighton's fate, however, was not his French but his lack of money. When in the autumn of 192 7 he accepted a lectureship in history at the University ofToronto he did not give up ambitions of research in French history, and teaching a course in the French Revolution whettted his appetite. But on a lecturer's salary a summer's research in Paris was desperately draining, and the young couple came home from the first summer's work in 1928 in parlous financial circumstances. There was no money for a bright Canadian student who wanted to study the French Revolu tion in Paris and write a Ph.D. thesis on the Girondins, and who hoped to end up teaching in Britain. Creighton would have liked to live in an ample and aged English country house, surrounded by lawns, gardens, history and civilization, with Luella as Lady Creighton, and himself as Sir Donald Creighton. Instead, in his research, in his mode ofliving, he got Canada-primitive, grubby, thinly civilized and preoccupied with the bourgeois savagery of 2 making money. Thus to Toronto he returned and in Toronto would he remain to the end of his life, save for the odd research trip abroad. He was made assistant professor in 1932, associate in 1939, and the top rank in 1945. His early years in Canadian research produced The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, I76o-I8fO, published in 1937. The Laurentian interpretation of Canadian history at the core of this book was derived from Harold Adams Innis. It rested on Canadian geographic reality and an economic view of Canadian history that came out of the fur trade, with its vast western and northern reaches. It was Canadian experience with a perspective out of cen tral Canada, in which Confederation would later become the DONALD CREIGHTON AND HIS MACDONALD xxxiii centrepiece. Further, the work that Creighton did for the Rowell Sirois Commission, British North America at Conftderation (I 9 3 9), reinforced his conviction that the strong powers given to the Dominion government in I 867 had been systematically weakened by decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. Through all this, Creighton's nationalism came gradually into being: Canadian geography made vibrant, Canadian history made articulate, and Canadian constitutional law revealed as a constant betrayal by distant British courts unknowing of Canadian ways.